Peter's Journal of the First Presidential Count and Washington's Inauguration, Showing how Vice-President Adams Got Ahead in the Ceremony

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Historicus
proprietor, 1885 - 24 pages
 

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Page 24 - Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, That His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes; and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success, the functions allotted to his charge.
Page 23 - On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens, a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence, one, who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature, and unpractised in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.
Page 18 - WELCOME, mighty chief, once more Welcome to this grateful shore ; Now no mercenary foe Aims again the fatal blow ; Aims at THEE the fatal blow. " Virgins fair and matrons grave, Those thy conquering arms did save, Build for THEE triumphal bowers. Strew, ye fair, his way with flowers, Strew your Hero's way with flowers.
Page 23 - ... of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision as the asylum of my declining years : A retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me, by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time.
Page 24 - ... former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow.citizens ; and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me; my error will be palliated by the motives .which misled me, and its consequences be judged by my country, with some share of the partiality in which they originated.

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